Fareed Zakaria: Newsweek’s Loss is CNN’s Gain?

Business Insider’s Joe Pompeo scoops that Fareed Zakaria is leaving Newsweek and CNN has big plans for him…

We hear that Fareed Zakaria, arguably the biggest name on Newsweek’s masthead, has decided to leave the magazine at the end of September. The news was announced to the magazine’s sales team yesterday, a source told us.

Newsweek did not immediately return calls and emails for comment.

We hear that CNN plans to build a bigger franchise around Zakaria, who hosts the hour-long foreign affairs program “Fareed Zakaria GPS.” CNN also did not immediately return a call and email for comment.

Update: The New York Times’ David Carr adds that Zakaria is going to Time Magazine…

The move consolidates Mr. Zakaria’s television and magazine pursuits under Time Warner, which owns Time magazine and CNN, where Mr. Zakaria has been host for the last two years of “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” a foreign affairs program shown on Sundays.

Mr. Zakaria said that the decision to switch weeklies made sense.

“All of my work will now appear at one company, and instead of a kind of awkwardness, there is a very real synergy,” he said over a quick lunch at the Time Warner Center in Manhattan. “There is a level of sophistication in this building about content — about the ways to promote it — that’s exciting.”